Religio civitatis. Spazi e simboli dell’esperienza religiosa di Roma tra Livio e Agostino

The essay proposes a historical-anthropological analysis of Rome’s urban space, understood as a sacred landscape, in which the interaction between divinities and men is regulated by religio, understood both as religious sentiment and as a set of rites that form a codified ceremonial system. The investigation starts from some of Livy’s most representative loci of the republican religious tradition (Camillus’ speech to the populus, who wanted to abandon Rome after the sack of the Gauls) and arrives at Augustine’s thought, in which the space of the Urbs is no longer sacralised by the presence of the numinous, but, emptied of that religio civitatis that had semantised it from the beginning, becomes the idealtypical manifestation of the civitas terrena.